American Psycho (2000)
Wall Street (1987)
Up until recently, when I thought about uptown/wealthy New York, my mind always conjured up a scene from American Psycho (2000), staring Christian Bale. I recall seeing the film around the tender age of about twelve or thirteen, behind my parent’s backs, of course. Patrick, Bale’s character, and his coworkers are out for a lunch or some sort of meal and when they go to pay, one character remarks, “…speaking of reasonable, it’s only $570.” 570 American dollars. Now, I don’t know about any of you, but $570 is not my idea of “reasonable.” They then proceed to toss their shiny credit cards on an empty plate without a second thought. The utter absurdity of this scene stuck with me because I come from a pretty well-off family, we’re not poor but we’re not filthy rich either, and we certainly don’t spend that much on lunch. In my mind, the fact that there were people out there living this grandiose was…amazing. I thought money was everything when I was twelve; I wanted to marry a rich man and wear fancy dresses and travel to different countries every week. Obviously there were some holes in my plan, but my point being is that I thought the rich could do whatever, whenever, simply because they had the means to do so.
Then… I grew up. I realized that money can’t and won’t buy happiness. As cliché as that sounds, it’s true. Whatever you’ve acquired by the end of the day won’t matter in the long run. What actually matters is what you contribute to society, yourself, your relationships etc. Looking back at my twelve-year-old mind, I laugh; no longer does the image from American Psycho pop into my head but an image from Wall Street (1987). Taken from Gordon Gecko’s office lobby, the second image is of a painting of a burning twenty dollar bill. I love this photo because not only does it foreshadow Bud’s eventual demise but it illustrates words about the status of money. Just because you have money, doesn’t mean you’re indestructible, everything has to decay or burn down at one point. I think of this image as a direct criticism to the lives of the people of the uptown/wealthy New York; perhaps they shouldn’t be putting so much emphasis on an object like money as they do now. There are only a few basic things we need to survive and Jacuzzi’s, limos and thousand dollar suits aren’t them. It’s all right to strive to be successful but if you aren’t doing anything meaningful with your surplus money, then what’s the point? Is your life fulfilled when you buy a rare African rug made out of some unpronounceable material only to brag about how well-cultured, or whatever, you are to your friends? I’m by no means saying we should all live a “rough” life and own one pair of pants and a t-shirt, just that we should be more sensible in how we value money itself.
I fear a world where money and acquiring more materials are the only factors that drive people (sounds a lot like how uptown/wealthy New Yorkers are portrayed nowadays) and we lose any personal connections that we so valued in the past. But money is just paper, and paper burns; sure, we can always make more, but when does the obsession end with this green paper?
